Harden comes back to haunt Spurs

HOUSTON — The Spurs knew what they were getting into when they arrived at the Toyota Center on Sunday night.

In the Houston Rockets, they were getting a cornered opponent scrapping for a spot at the bottom of the Western Conference playoff bracket.

In Rockets guard James Harden, they were getting a singular foe who has made a living, not to mention tens of millions of dollars, with his ability to get to the free-throw line.

That foreknowledge would be of little comfort a few hours later, when the Spurs left Houston saddled with a 96-95 loss made possible in part by Harden’s 17 visits to the foul stripe.

“Give him a lot of credit, he played well tonight,” Spurs forward Tim Duncan said. “I don’t think he earned 17 free throws. I think we had a couple in there that were missed calls.”

Harden finished with 29 points, 15 of which came from the foul line.

He capped his night by hitting the game-winning jumper, an off-balance 15-footer with 4.5 seconds left, gaining the necessary space perhaps because his defender, Kawhi Leonard, was reticent about giving him free-throw tries No. 18 and 19.

By night’s end, Harden had gone to the charity stripe more times than any Spurs opponent this season. The previous high was 11, shared by the Oklahoma City duo of Kevin Durant and Russell Westbrook and Indiana’s David West.

“He was aggressive with it,” Duncan said. “He took shots and made (officials) make calls and kept them right in the game.”

Combined with Oklahoma City’s victory over Portland, the loss cut the Spurs’ lead atop the Western Conference to 1 1/2 games with a brutal homestand (Denver, the L.A. Clippers and Miami) looming this week.

As such, nights like Sunday are particularly tough for the Spurs (53-17) to swallow.

It was a Spurs-Rockets game Jeff Van Gundy and the old Gregg Popovich would have loved, a low-scoring, grind-it-out affair that came down to the final possession.

“It was a hard-fought game,” said Manu Ginobili, who was 1 of 6 for three points and missed a putback at the buzzer. “It felt like a playoff one.”

Before the game, the Spurs talked about limiting Harden’s free-throw tries. He was averaging a league-best 10.3 per game, a number the Spurs aimed to keep him from reaching.

“That didn’t work out very well,” Popovich said.

Despite Harden’s free-throw largesse, and their 18 turnovers good for 20 Houston points, the Spurs had a chance to win it at the end.

With Tony Parker scoring 12 consecutive points, and their defense limiting Houston to 12 misses in 13 field goal tries at one point in the fourth, the Spurs seized a 93-89 lead with 1:50 left.

A Leonard steal led to a Danny Green layup attempt at the other end, which Houston guard Patrick Beverley raced to swat away. That block led to a 3-pointer by the Rockets’ Chandler Parsons — who finished with 20 points — slicing what could have been a six-point Spurs lead to one with 1:19 left.

“I thought one of the plays of the game was Patrick running down that block,” said Houston coach Kevin McHale, whose team (39-31) pulled within half a game of Golden State for the sixth seed in the West. “That was a phenomenal block.”

Parker had 23 points and seven assists in his second game back from a sprained left ankle, and was the driving force in a 14-2 run that put the Spurs ahead.

Yet the Spurs’ final play, inbounded after Harden’s go-ahead jumper, went through Duncan — who had 17 points and five turnovers — and Ginobili.

It was a play that had produced for the Spurs before. With Ginobili blanketed by Beverley, it came up empty Sunday, with Duncan having to force a difficult fadeaway over Omer Asik. Ginobili had a clean look at a putback from 8 feet as the horn sounded but, feeling rushed, left it short.

“I didn’t think I’d have time to let it go, so I did a too-quick release,” Ginobili said. “Now it’s easy to say, but I had two or three tenths of a second more. At the time, it was impossible to know.”

And Sunday, the Spurs had a hard enough time overcoming that which it was possible to know.